Nathaniel Tkacz - Being with Data

Poovey further argues that DEB didn’t do away with rhetoric entirely, but rather repositioned rhetoric as a component of the system, visible in different elements of its formats: ‘The system of double-entry books displayed virtue graphically, by the balances prominently featured at the end of each set of facing ledger pages and by the order evident in the books as a system.’ 37The idea that late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century DEB was structured as a work of rhetoric is supported by others, such a James Aho, who has pointed out that everything from the ‘properly humble and thankful Christian salutation’ atop the ledger, to the ‘procedure to invent material for inclusion in the ledger’ or how the elements of the accounts relate to each other, all correspond to specific components of (largely) Ciceronian rhetoric. 38

We see in DEB a specific formatting of economic activity; one that produces distinct kinds of numbers with an epistemological value that seemingly no longer requires interpretation and appears transparent to those who cast their eyes upon them. We also see, however, that whatever formatting work DEB accomplished, its formats are themselves pulled in different directions and take on different characteristics over time. The early DEB that Poovey and Aho consider was strongly influenced by rhetoric; it was literally arranged as rhetoric. Oddly enough, it was this arrangement that laid the grounds for numbers’ apparent transcendence of the epistemological conditions of rhetoric. While Poovey doesn’t straightforwardly equate DEB’s numbers with facts, she claims that in DEB the modern fact existed in ‘embryonic form’. DEB’s formatting produced a way of relating to numbers that foreshadowed the facts of modern science. While I find Poovey’s work compelling, one does not need to accept her argument about DEB and modern facts to get a sense of how a format is able to produce, through its arrangements, presentation and display (among other things), numbers with a distinct epistemological value. One can also see how a format is itself shaped by the forces of the day (in this case, Ciceronian rhetoric), in ways that might not be immediately obvious but clearly influence its arrangements and the qualities of things being arranged. 39

For Poovey, the numbers found in DEB are significant in their role as precursor to the ‘epistemological unit that has dominated modernity’, namely modern facts. 40Well before Poovey’s epistemologically orientated inquiry, however, many others had similarly argued for the significance of DEB vis-à-vis the broad trajectory of modern society. Max Weber identified DEB as a key stage in the development of modern rationalization and a necessary ingredient of capitalism. Joseph Schumpeter and Werner Sombart agreed with Weber on DEB’s rationalizing function and its importance for modern capitalism. Out of the three, Sombart in particular accorded DEB the highest significance, declaring that ‘capitalism and double entry bookkeeping are absolutely indissociable; their relationship to each other is that of form to content’. 41In a passage that reads like a precursor of German media theory, Sombart adds the following regarding the notion of capital: ‘The very concept of capital is derived from this way of looking at things; one can say that capital, as a category, did not exist before double-entry bookkeeping.’ 42Since these Germanic reflections on DEB, more weight has been given to its theological and rhetorical role as opposed to its assumed rational and technical superiority, though its significance as system, practice and indeed format is not disputed. 43

If Poovey considered the modern fact as the dominant epistemological unit for the period of modernity, besides playing a crucial role in this history, the influence of DEB extends well beyond Poovey’s concerns, underpinning centuries of commerce while also providing a moral basis (through its rhetorical function) for commercial activity itself. 44We can see that formats have the power to radically alter epistemological systems; not just what is considered knowledge (or not) but more fundamentally how one approaches and perceives items of epistemological significance. As Poovey shows, formats can also lay the ground for further transformations in the things that have undergone formatting, in her case the unleashing of a new potential ‘facticity’ within numbers that would ripple across early modern science. The importance others have placed on DEB in relation to rationalization and capitalism further confirms this capacity to format the social.

I introduce DEB to help flesh out my conception of format (without anticipating the material to come) and to communicate the significance of certain formats regarding the contours of societies past and present. While it would be naive to consider DEB as only a format or number of formats, or to attribute its historical role to the work of formatting alone, it would be equally naive to underestimate the significance of arranging numbers (or code, data, text, images) time and time again and in standardized ways; ways that can travel and insinuate themselves into the routines of daily life, habituating forms of being and knowing, interpreting and perceiving.

DEB also provides an interesting contrast to the dashboard as a format. Like DEB, the dashboard has found a home in commerce and, in particular, the management of large and medium-sized organizations. As we shall see, with at least one of the historical trajectories belonging to the dashboard format, dashboards are presented as a development from mid-twentieth-century accounting, specifically in relation to the rise of ‘industrial accounting’. One finds within the dashboard format a new relation to numbers and data, one that includes not only the financial numbers typical of accounting, but also non-financial numbers and forms of representation no longer in the service of balancing the books or auditing. Like DEB, dashboards are also loaded, or layered, with epistemological and broader cultural significance. If DEB served a rhetorical function, adding legitimacy to commerce (at a time when profit on lending money or ‘usury’ was prohibited) through the production of numbers that were always ‘in balance’, the dashboard too is caught up with technological and managerial ideals. And if DEB provided ‘writing positions’ and accompanying forms of authority derived from its system, so too does the dashboard privilege certain ways of knowing and doing, certain types of organizational arrangements, and certain ways of representing data and numbers. The dashboard is no straightforward replacement of the formats of accounting and I will not speculate as to whether it will attain the historical significance of DEB. The dashboard criss-crosses with accounting in certain historical moments, but also contains within it layers from different historical trajectories and present tendencies that reach far beyond the numerical representation found in accounting ledgers. The dashboard has already been with us for over a century, slowing, stabilizing and recursively adapting to new technological configurations, absorbing the visions of its designers, engineers and the cultures which put it to work in predictable or unexpected ways. If DEB produced a form of ‘noninterpretative’ numerical representation that was able to travel and become a bedrock of modern science, it is not so much the travelling of data in dashboards that is of interest, but rather the travelling of the dashboard format itself.

The notions of format and formatting provide the conceptual underpinning of this study of data and dashboards. They are how I hold the two together (data and dashboards) and inform many of the specific observations I will make about each. As much as this is a study of data and dashboards, it is a study of formats and the work of formatting.